AV Testing Proposal

With the seemingly infinite questions raised about how reliable AV tests are, i would like to propose this.

I wonder why some clever people can't lump together All the viruses out there, and make those available to test with. If they wanted they could charge for them. I notice some tests are reportedly done with a few hundred, and others with a few thousand etc. Being selective with the viruses doesn't help anyone in the long run.

This could become a standard database on which to fairly judge one against the other, and of course be added to with all the latest viruses. Also a list of all the viruses tested should be published to show what they were for transparency.

Ease of use, update frequency, what the gui looks like etc etc, are credible factors too in a review. But they are seperate from the main purpose of an AV, which is to be able to Positively detect as many viruses as possible, either with or without heuristics.


StevieO

 

That is what the wildlist and the zoo virus list was supposed to be for, but it doesn't always work the way it was supposed to unfortunatly.

 

I agree with what your saying as far as stressing to much importance on ease of use,etc.But i think heuristics and frequency of updates are very important and not stressed enough because we all face that scenario everyday.When you take an AV{ ah, you thought i was going to say it didn't ya, n_____, who's heuristics are not as good as some of the others and takes many more hours on average to update their definitions, there's a huge opportunity for infection here.So if your not the best in heuristics, then you better be the first on updating.